As Internet technologies are developing and becoming mature, Internet users are increasing continuously, and people's work, life and entertainment are more dependent on a network. Therefore, user traffic in the network also sharply increases accordingly, which causes that the network becomes more congested and user experience of Internet surfing decreases greatly. In a traditional distributed network architecture, each content source runs independently. Therefore, a current network status cannot be considered when any content source initiates traffic. In addition, traffic in the network includes a large amount of non-real-time and high-bandwidth content traffic, such as geographic redundancy traffic of a data center, synchronization traffic of a content delivery network (CDN), and migration traffic of a virtual machine (VM). The traffic conflicts with traffic with a high real-time requirement, thereby diminishing user experience of a real-time service. Therefore, a higher requirement is imposed on network construction, and scheduling and use of network resources.
Generally, when constructing a network, a network constructor performs planning and construction according to prediction on peak-hour network traffic. However, with a continuous increase of users who surf the Internet, network traffic also increases continuously, and the peak-hour traffic continuously exceeds designer's expectation, resulting in network congestion during the peak hour and degraded service quality. If the peak-hour traffic is handled only by improving network resources, network construction costs will increase greatly, and only network resources are wasted most of the time.
In the prior art, a software defined network (SDN) separates a control plane of a network device from a data plane of the network device, so as to implement flexible control of network traffic and facilitates innovation of a core network and application. By scheduling network resources, the software defined network balances unbalanced utilization of resources in a network, which, however, can be performed only within a range of resources carried in the entire network, and when peak-hour traffic exceeds the range of the resources in the entire network, a case in which the network is congested still exits. Therefore, a problem that the resources in the entire network are inadequate during the peak hour still cannot be resolved.